When Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Richard Feynman spoke at CalTech in 1959, everyone thought he was referencing adjunct teaching, the title of his lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", instead he was thinking of manipulating atoms so they could carry information. He was anticipating the biological revolution that has consumed physics. He anticipated that the future implied smaller, not bigger. In his lecture, Feynman spoke of how the entire Encyclopedia Britannica could be written on the head of a pin. Interesting idea for 1959. Turns out physicists are doing it today.

Physicists at Tufts University covered a sheet of copper with chlorine atoms, by sliding pairs of atoms back and forth using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the bits were arranged to form a byte, enough to encode a single letter upon an atom. The STM method permitted them to source 78 trillion bits per square centimeter, this is hundreds of times denser than state of the art hard drives.

The only problem was limiting the movement of atoms throughout this process. To slow their movement, Tufts dropped the temperature of the copper sheet to -196 degrees, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Future problems involve solving how best to operate at warmer temperatures like room temperature.